Who is winning the F1 team-mate wars

We're just four races into the 2015 Formula 1 season and it's interesting to see that many drivers are now starting to search through the well-used book of excuses to explain why they are slower than their team-mates.

I fully understand that small problems can play a part, but qualifying is where you normally see who has the edge on pure speed when it comes to wringing a laptime out of a car.

That is, for me, the most interesting and revealing part of a grand prix weekend.

No matter what a driver tells you, beating your team-mate is everything. If you qualify 19th out of 20, as long as the guy behind you is your team-mate you will feel OK.

Stevens has had the edge on Merhi so far at the back of the grid © XPB

That's why Manor driver Will Stevens will have felt pretty good about his Saturday performance in Bahrain.

But if you qualify third when your team-mate is on pole position, it's a different matter even if you are at the right end of the grid.

If you are always slower than your team-mate in qualifying, then in the race you will more often than not be behind them. That then brings another set of disadvantages.

You will never be the team's priority and you will usually get the second-best strategy - although in Nico Rosberg's case last weekend, he was allowed to make his first pitstop before Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton to avoid giving Sebastian Vettel a two-lap undercut.

But worst of all, the team will start to follow the lead driver and suddenly you will find yourself as a good number two. At that point, your side of the garage has a lot fewer people in it than your team-mate's.

Let's look at a couple of examples. In China, we heard Rosberg ranting about how Hamilton was potentially compromising his race.

But he was behind Lewis on the grid and he was running second, so what was that bleating all about? He was being used as a good number two.

Then, in Bahrain qualifying it was all about tyre strategy, so his side of the garage decided to try something different because they (and this includes him) decided it was the best thing to do to potentially get one over Lewis.

It didn't work and Rosberg reckoned his careful lap in Q2 (designed to protect the set of soft-compound Pirellis he would start the race on), and then conservative first lap on used rubber in Q3, meant he wasn't at his best on his proper run. Live with it...

Kimi Raikkonen had a good race in Bahrain, finishing second, but his qualifying performance wasn't perfect, ending up 0.245s behind Ferrari team-mate Vettel. He admitted that he underestimated the grip available.

Kimi keeps saying he must eliminate qualifying mistakes, and in Bahrain he says he should have pushed harder. But if he had pushed harder would the mistakes have reappeared?

Is he overdriving because he wants to make sure he is not forgotten? Let's face it, new boy Vettel is doing a good job in the other car.

Hamilton is a step above Rosberg at the moment out in front © LAT

Rosberg and Raikkonen are both top-notch drivers but at some point in time you have to accept that, if everything goes as planned, Hamilton and Vettel have normally just got that edge.

They are both right at the top of their games and probably feeling the whole situation better than they have ever done.

This small but significant offset is the same all the way through the grid.

We've heard a lot over the past week about drivers and how Vettel and Fernando Alonso have number-one status, and I am pretty sure that this is what Hamilton wants at Mercedes. Money means a lot but those few words written on a contract mean you are the man.

If I was looking at the driver line-up we have this year I would have to say that my number-one drivers would be:

Mercedes: Lewis Hamilton
Ferrari: Sebastian Vettel
Williams: Valtteri Bottas
Red Bull: Daniel Ricciardo
McLaren: Fernando Alonso
Lotus: Romain Grosjean
Force India: Nico Hulkenberg
Toro Rosso: Jury still out
Sauber: Felipe Nasr
Manor: Will Stevens

Stevens is not a driver I knew much about before he popped up in F1, but he is doing a competent job in very difficult circumstances. And at Toro Rosso, both Carlos Sainz Jr and Max Verstappen are performing to a good standard so that one is hard to call.

Here's how the qualifying statistics pan out in the team-mate wars:

Hamilton 4-0 Rosberg
Ricciardo 4-0 Kvyat
Massa 3-1 Bottas
Vettel 4-0 Raikkonen
Alonso/Magnussen 0-3 Button*
Perez 1-3 Hulkenberg
Sainz 2-2 Verstappen
Grosjean 4-0 Maldonado
Nasr 3-1 Ericsson
Stevens 2-0 Merhi**
*Button was unable to set a time in Bahrain
**Manor has only run both cars in the last two events

Obviously, the two exceptions here are that I've picked Alonso over Button, and Bottas as my Williams leader rather than Massa.

Vettel appears to have the edge at Ferrari, but Raikkonen is getting closer © LAT

Felipe is driving well, but Bottas has been compromised by his back problem, which he said he was feeling no discomfort from for the first time in Bahrain - and then outqualified his team-mate.

Massa is an experienced driver, but Bottas has shown he has the ability to be a really top performer and he is only going to continue to get better.

I think it's time to realise that we don't actually have the best 20 drivers in the world in F1.

They are all pretty good but there are better drivers out there and Formula 1's main objective as a whole should be to put them all together somehow.

Unfortunately, with so many teams in difficult financial situations, it's inevitable that some have to take cash over talent.

While the overall standard of the grid is high, there's certainly some drivers in the field at the moment who would not be there if it was just the best in the world.